Rust never burns out or fades away

Jon Rose wants to know where all the music has disappeared to. ''The world has gone incredibly quiet and Sydney is a particularly bad example,'' he says. ''Where has all the live music gone? People think it's OK, that somehow we've moved on and we don't need all that messy, dirty music stuff, but we need music like we need sex. It's fundamental to being a human being.

''We're in a situation now where music is not important. People say, 'I really like music' but they don't mean that. They mean there's a sound in their earbuds while they are on the train and they are using a digital file to block out the sound of the natural environment.''

Music has been fundamental to Rose for more than 50 years - ever since he began demonstrating a precocious talent for the violin at the age of seven. Perhaps most famously, he has played (with a bow) fences all over the world and in every state and territory in Australia.

''The conceit is that the entire continent is a musical instrument and is not covered by millions of miles of fences but it is covered by millions of miles of string instrument,'' he says.

Rose has travelled more than 30,000 kilometres exploring the musical properties of fences around the country and the rich life of the Australian inland. As he travelled around, his eye was drawn to the thousands of car wrecks that litter the outback. And, being Rose, he pondered the musical possibilities of the rusting hulks.

Wreck, the project he is bringing to Sydney, is the result of those ruminations. It involves playing or ''sonifying'' a rusting old car, brought from what was to be its final resting place near the outback NSW town of White Cliffs.

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''For some people it's just a car wreck, for others it's a piece of sculpture, for us it's a musical instrument,'' says Rose, of the Blue Mountains. ''In a sense it's the perfect wreck because it is iconic - it's a Kingswood ute.''

The wreck will be bowed, struck and amplified in a dozen different ways by Rose and his collaborators.

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''You have to bring your earplugs. It will be extreme and packed into a 20-minute show.''

How does he expect the audience to respond? ''They can walk out, although people tend not to walk out these days, that's so '70s. These days they tend not to turn up in the first place if they think they won't like it. The only concern is that they should respond somehow.''

Rose's path with the violin has been anything but conventional. ''I was one of those children that would basically not do as they were told,'' he says. ''I was given the music and given the instrument and told this is what it sounds like; this is how you play it and this is what you are going to be doing for the rest of your life. I just said no.

''I wanted to play improvised music. I wanted to play things other than the classical canon but there were no models that sounded any good.''

To his ears, the jazz idiom of Grappelli and Menuhin was ''corny'' and it was only when he came to Australia in 1976 from England that everything fell into place. The violin would remain as a central object in his practice and everything else would expand around it in a ''total artform''.

''I started to pull the instruments apart and combine them to make different homemade instruments,'' he says. ''I used to make stories up about them and take them to places where they weren't normally played.''

This ''relative violin'' approach led Rose to create instruments that include a 19-string violin, a polystyrene violin and a ''well-strung ironing board'' as well as initiate a bewildering number of diverse projects, all with a violin focus.

Rose is an inveterate tinkerer and adapter. ''If you said, 'Jon, would you like to go to a really expensive antique shop today or would you prefer to go to a junk shop', you know which one I'm going to pick. One is interesting and the other is really boring.''

The installation Wreck is at Carriageworks from Friday to January 17 and performances are from Friday to Sunday, free.